


Mythos

by Vnutrenni



Category: El Laberinto del Fauno | Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Genre: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 04:14:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vnutrenni/pseuds/Vnutrenni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>False dawn in the absence of stars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mythos

Light blooms stark and arid on the fingertips of her beloved black trees, clustered there in the central garden, slim as fluted ebony and cool to the touch. Sometimes she goes there alone, but often she will stand on the high slope that looks out over the kingdom and taste the clean peak of the wind on her tongue as she whispers for her old companion.

 _I am going to the trees_ , she says, across knotted canopies and wastelands and a distant coast thrashed by darkness. _Do you want to see them?_

And, of course, he does.

Through a long corridor of silver vines and branches that rise like curving bones. Glass vials hang on hooks and waxen stems, brimming with sulfurous orange ichor scavenged from the belly of the world. These are few, and lovely; long shadows stretch open around them, soft as ash on feathered wings, enraptured. Fire is a foreign voice among all the translucent leaves chiming crystalline and the petals cut gently from the memory of moonlight; but this, the central garden, is where the princess sleeps when she will have no more of gowns and silk with precious threads and jewelry laid with ancient stones. This is where she waits and dreams. Gemstones make her heart heavy. She comes here to blossom with her silent messengers, the flowers and trees, and they see her sweet disposition and they learn from her. Even the echo of flame finds itself welcome, and even the echo of flame could never bear to do so much as bruise the pale flesh of a young floret. Not here.

She leads him under the dark spread of her black-tree aviary, sheltered from the eager press of endless, open space. The slender boughs bend toward him, they touch the venerable marks on his forehead, his temples. Like them, he is a relic of the primeval record, still wedded to the vast sweep of deep time. They show the proper respect.

_Hello again._

Moanna smiles at his fondness, the way he takes the impossible, scintillant leaves in his long fingers, just to feel the presence of an ageless friend. She opens her own hands, and the trees fill them, coiling in her soft palms, moving their papery hides along her skin. In her grasp, they leave behind small, sighing fragments of light.

 _May I shape a sky for you?_ she asks, because she is gracious girl whose eyes are flecked with immortality and a disconcerting grasp of what it must mean to live forever.

The faun pretends to deliberate. A quiet moment, still in the way that the air and the origin were, long before they came to life. He spends it studying her; the texture of her skin, the smoky cast of shadow rising from her gift of light.

At last he smiles and says: _A little one, Your Highness, if you would_.

Her fingers move like the needles of creation. She curls them up and spreads them wide and the light responds, turning over, sliding in and out of complicated knots in a language that the faun has always known but never spoken. She twists them into skeins of twilight. Woven together, end over end, they shine. A scrap of the night sky rests in her hands, a tiny window opening onto the fabled surface, the world far above the world they know.

The black trees sway and murmur in approval. Moanna hands it to them; they take it carefully, they touch; they knit it wider and raise it, a crown for the darkness, and all the little lights nearby clamour in amazement.

She watches it wordlessly for some time. They all do.

 _Is it good, I wonder?_ she says aloud, with the white glow overhead washing all the youth from her face. Her creationist's hands tangle around the question and find it intangible.

 _Sight unseen_ , the faun replies, watching her. _There has never been anything more beautiful_.

And twilight retreats, siphoned off into the darkness to find the place where legend grows.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at fanfiction.net under the penname "Raihu".


End file.
